occurred to her that it might not be Sam Zachary who was making all that decidedly domestic racket. He had inquired about her marital status, she recalled, but she hadn’t asked him if he was married, had she? Instead she’d just assumed—maybe even vaguely hoped—he wasn’t.
“Stupid,” she muttered, wrenching her tight skirt into line and tucking in her chin to check for any undue exposure. She did the best she could to disguise her cleavage, then sighed. It probably didn’t matter. As a private investigator’s wife, Mrs. Sam Zachary had no doubt seen her share of weirdos and woebegone people. Laura was feeling a bit of both when she reached the bottom of the stairs and turned left, past the dining room, in order to search out the kitchen.
Sam was standing at the sink, his back to the door while his wide shoulders almost blocked out the light from the blue gingham-curtained window. Gingham apron strings from a big floppy bow in the center of his back dangled over his decidedly iron buns. Sam Zachary in an apron! If there was a Mrs. Zachary, Laura thought, the woman definitely belonged in the matrimonial hall of fame.
“Hey,” she said, stepping into the room.
“Hey.” He turned sideways just enough to give her a glimpse of the ruffles on the apron’s bib. “You fell asleep.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan to.”
“No problem. Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re in charge of the salad.” He picked up a white plastic colander and held it out in her direction. “The garden’s out the back door to the left. There are tomatoes and onions and radishes, a couple of early peppers, and maybe even some endive left.”
Laura grasped the colander, trying not to let her expression betray the fact that she hadn’t the vaguest idea what endive looked like. Especially on the hoof, so to speak. Jeez. Didn’t they have supermarkets around here?
“Back in a jiffy,” she said as she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside where she inhaled a long draught of the clean country air ever-so-slightly tinged with roses. It was nice, she thought, not to breathe bus fumes and three-day-old garbage. She was going to enjoy this little vacation.
The well-tended, rectangular garden was easy enough to find, even though her three-inch heels had an annoying tendency to sink into the ground. She pulled two red tomatoes from a tall vine, then bent forward and plucked a little clump of leaves from the dark soil.
“What do you know? A radish!” she murmured, shaking off some of the dirt before plopping it into the plastic bowl and proceeding to pick several more of its mates. The onions weren’t all that difficult to identify, and she tugged up four of those. Then she straightened up and gave the rest of the garden the once-over, searching for the mysterious endive.
Spying something green with curly leaves on the far side of the little plot, she made her way on tiptoe around a pinwheeling plastic sunflower and several wire cages. Then—“Oh, please, please, don’t let this be anything poisonous.”—she reached down to pluck a leaf just as something sprang up into her face.
She jerked upright. The thing, the horrible thing, was in her hair, so she batted at it, only to have the creature take a flying leap down the front of her dress.
Then Laura did what any normal, self-respecting city girl would do. She screamed bloody murder.
Sam dropped the potato peeler in the sink, picked up the 12-gauge shotgun behind the back door, and was out in the backyard in mere seconds expecting to find his client fighting for her very life with a bruiser named Artie. Instead she was hopping around the back of the garden, flapping the front of her dress, screaming “Get it off me! Get it off me!”
He put the gun down in the grass and headed toward the garden, trying to wipe off the grin that he knew would only irritate her.
“Get it off me,” she shrieked as he neared.
“Hold still.”
Apparently she couldn’t, so he grasped her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Will you hold still? It’s probably just a grasshopper. It’s not going to hurt you.”
“Get. It. Off.” Her eyes squinched closed in her already squinched face.
“Okay. Okay.”
He looked at her hair and scanned the blue velvet on her shoulders and neckline. “I don’t see anything. It must’ve taken off.”
“It’s down my dress,” she said.
“Down…” Sam’s gaze dropped to the pale skin bordered by a hint of black lace. “I can’t…”
“Get it,” she shrieked.
“Hold still.”
He closed his own eyes a second, letting out a kind of heaven-help-me sigh, then eased his fingers into the front of the dress, down into black lace and blue velvet and warm, firm flesh. Lucky little guy, he thought, as he gently pinched the ends of a pair of frantic wings, then eased the insect as well as himself up and out. The grasshopper shot away in a single, ecstatic leap.
“You can open your eyes now,” Sam said.
She did, but just barely. “I hate bugs.”
Sam retrieved the colander that Laura had apparently flung off into space when she was attacked, and now he was picking up scattered vegetables and at the same time trying not to think about the heat his hand had so recently encountered beneath all that blue velvet. He started to say something, but she sliced him with a glare.
“And don’t you dare say they’re more afraid of me than I am of them, Sam Zachary, because it isn’t true.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Sam said, reaching to break off a few tender leaves of endive and laying them on top of the tomatoes and radishes and green onions. “I was only going to ask you how you like your steak and what kind of dressing you prefer on your salad.”
“Oh.” She gave a little shrug. “Medium, I guess, and Thousand Island. French would be fine, too.”
“Okay.”
He shouldn’t have asked, Sam thought, since he had every intention of grilling the rib eye black on the outside and a perfect, medium-rare pink inside, and tossing the salad with a tarragon vinaigrette.
All of a sudden he felt irritable, curmudgeonly, like a doddering old bachelor too set in his ways to even listen to anyone else’s preferences. Or worse. Too comfortable with the familiar to appreciate something new and different. Someone new and different.
“Better get back inside,” he grumbled, “before the praying mantises start to swarm.” He handed her the colander. “Here. Take this. I need to get my shotgun.”
She shivered. “Not for the praying mantises, I hope.”
“No.” He picked up the gun. “I only use this on the wolf spiders.”
“You were kidding, right, about the wolf spiders?” Laura asked halfway through dinner.
They were sitting in
